Lark Crafts

The Artist Through Her Work

The Artist In Her Own Words

Sim Luttin is a contemporary jeweler who lives and works in Melbourne, Australia. Her current work, Melancholy Series, poetically explores notions of beauty, nostalgia and passing time.

Luttin’s jewelry pieces question how the creation of objects can guide or replace memory. As intimate objects, Melancholy Series alludes to forms found in nature, while deliberately abstracting them in order to de-familiarize the familiar.

Luttin’s latest collection embodies pathos, and evokes strong feelings of melancholy through an almost alien or foreign lens. Sim Luttin

The Artist At Work

The Artist’s Favored Quotes

Art, like life, is a challenge. It challenges all our resources, mentally and physically…It eludes methodology, technology, or ritual…It is, like life, more about being human, being vulnerable, being imperfect, and about things unexplainable. J. Fred Woell

I can barely conceive of a type of beauty in which there is no Melancholy. Charles Baudelaire

The Artist & Lark Jewelry

Sim Luttin has designed step-by-step projects for two Lark Crafts books, 30-Minute Earrings (June 2010) and the upcoming 30-Minute Rings (April 2011). Images of the Sim’s jewelry have been featured in 500 Necklaces (October 2006), 500 Earrings (April 2007),  Modern Jewelry from Modular Parts (November 2007), and the upcoming 500 Silver Jewelry Designs (March 2011).

The Artist in the World

Sim Luttin recalls her earliest memory of what she wanted to be when she grew up was to be an inventor. She was encouraged to do things in a more labor intensive, meticulous way, which was often a longer, highly detailed process. Now, many years later, she approaches her creative work this way.

Luttin has a Masters in Metalsmithing and Jewelry Design, Indiana University, USA and a BFA in Gold and Silversmithing, RMIT, Melbourne, AUS.

Achievements include solo exhibitions at Studio Ingot and Pieces of Eight, Melbourne, AUS and Metalab, Sydney, AUS; group exhibitions nationally and internationally, including most recently in By Example, Itami, Japan; 2009 Emeritus Medal Commission, Australia Council for the Arts, AUS; Alma Eikerman Award for Metalsmithing, Indiana University, USA; Australia Council Emerging Artist New Work Grant, AUS.

Luttin has work in the collection of Galerie Marzee, NL, and the Art Gallery of South Australia, AUS and has been published in numerous publications.